Cisco has virtual versions of their traditional ASA firewall, as well as the Firepower next-generation firewall. Similarly, Palo Alto offers their own PA Series physical firewalls, which provide protection for a wide range of enterprise and business operations such as branch and retail store networks and medium-sized enterprises (PA-200, PA-400, and PA-800), internet gateways (PA-3200), medium to large service providers and high-performance data centers (PA-5200 and PA-7000).īoth companies also have virtual appliances in their firewall arsenal. Cisco Firepower hardware firewall appliances scale from small business and small branch protection (Firepower 1000) solutions, to support for large branches, campuses, and data centers (Firepower 2100 and Firepower 4100), all the way to firewall solutions for service providers and high-performance data centers (Firepower 9300). Palo Alto & Cisco Next-Gen Firewall Product SuitesĬisco's next-generation firewalls are known by the Firepower brand.

Both Palo Alto and Cisco boast a full range of next-gen firewall appliances with both physical and virtual versions. In general, next-generation firewalls typically have the capabilities of traditional firewalls, plus features such as intrusion prevention, advanced threat protection, deep packet inspection, and application-layer control. In this post, we'll move on to the products themselves and compare the next-generation firewall technologies of these two leading vendors. In discussing certifications, we talked about the potential career synergies in becoming accredited in both selected Cisco and Palo Alto networking and cybersecurity domains. In the first two articles, we have discussed the reasons to use Palo Alto solutions and the company's certification opportunities for network engineers. We've come to the third and final post related to Palo Alto technologies.

Firewall solutions